AUTHOR'S PREFACE
When I was a child I used often to hear an old Greenlandic woman tell how, far away North, at the end of the world, there lived a people who dressed in bearskins and ate raw flesh.
Their country was always shut in by ice, and the daylight never reached over the tops of their high fjelds.
Whoever wished to go there, must travel with the South wind, right up to the Lord of the wild northern gales.
Even before I knew what travelling meant, I determined that one day I would go and find these people, whom my fancy pictured different from all others. I must go and see "The New People," as the old story-teller called them.
While I was growing up in Denmark, the thought of them was always with me, and the first decision I came to as a man was that I would go to look for them. My opportunity arrived, and as a member of the "Danish Literary Expedition. to Greenland," I passed the winter of 1903-1904 among these Polar Eskimos, the most northerly dwelling people in the world.
And it is from this sojourn, remote from all civilisation, that the following recollections date.
KNUD RASMUSSEN.
